ABSTRACT
In his autobiography, Lost in Music, musician Giles Smith describes his adolescent initiation into The Dark Side of the Moon at an all-male gathering presided over by an older, 'more experienced', hippie peer: 'Each of us sat there in the black-out, overawed. This chapter outline two possible approaches to masculinities in popular music generally and in particular Pink Floyd: in terms of high culture and popular culture. The first discourse it discusses in terms of 'rock as art' – the use of high cultural ideologies by participants within popular music and the degree to which this can be read as a gendered discourse. The second identifies rock, in contrast, as 'music of the people' (counter)culture, a means of popular creative expression, in which value is attributed to music according to the degree of 'authenticity' it has for a particular, non-dominant social group – the history of The Dark Side of the Moon in terms of its audiences.
